Creatures of a Breif Season
by p for pseudonymous
Summary: The first soldiers are always children and this is an old war. It happens the way gods are renamed, how they cease to dress them in jewels. Whose skin are they wearing now? "We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain." -Philip Pullman


_Disclaimer: It should be noted that this document is a work of fanfiction and therefore any recognizable characters, events, ect. do not belong to me._

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 _1 September 1972_

The steam engine is scarlet, blood that blooms from her fingertips when she pricks them on thorns of flowers just as red. Gold ribbons like the coin her mother keeps tucked away in her pocket, layers of heavy velvet and satin hiding the token from its flaming cousin that hangs, suspended, within the sky—"just in case," she says.

Marlene McKinnon is only eleven years old, born upon the cusp of two signs, volatile and contradictory. And even then, living a mere solitary year beyond a decade, more memories made and lost, she knows it is vital—the rising of the chest, and a blooming soul, flower petals in the spring, and snow in winter, melting like fluid sorrow when it's burdened with heat—to be prepared for that 'just in case'.

The bench seats within the train are sewn purple with golden threads, that same burning hue, 'just in case,' because her mother had smacked her hand when Marlene had stuck it in her pocket, round bracing edges and delicate fingers scrabbling for a promise.

They are small bodies against worn cotton: hands on knees, sweaty palms, a certain familiarity that cannot be shared by others, cannot be shared by Marlene. Because she is only eleven years old and they have each lived a full year beyond her, experiences she will never grasp, cool air sliding through parted fingers, pulling at her hair. James has always done that, a gentle tug on a wayward strand, a pull towards a life of adventure and bravery. She's not sure her heart can take it because it beats so fast already, oxygen and blood, crimson upon the sky.

She is only eleven years old and they have each lived twelve. Their bones are solid steel and hers still brittle calcium, grinding teeth and chips of white paint.

Her and James used to be nothing but knobby knees and bruised skin and burnt cheeks in the summer. Soil under fingernails because they're always searching, always looking for something more; James is so relentlessly adamant that there is something to be found. And Marlene? Well, she isn't quite so sure.

When fall would descend with the same indolence as leaves on the trees they would fly broomsticks through the brisk air, summer's purple bruises fading away to yellow. And they always dressed in red and gold. Those two colors again, they scorch a brand upon the soul.

James and those other three boys wear it like a pennant, colors seeping, and coursing through their veins. They laugh, red cheeks, fingers clutching at their sides, and they cry liquid gold, hidden tears of treasure.

The cabin is not so crowded to be uncomfortable and the boys welcome her—"She's going to be in Gryffindor," James tells them; oh and how easy it is for them to believe him, for them to accept her as one of their own, basis only upon the words of a child, but he sounds so sure—Marlene knows in time, clocks ticking, slower than the thrumming of her insides but still fast, so fast, things will grow: their hair, blonde and brown and black; their steel bones and bleeding hearts; the discomfort of forgetting someone even as you sit right beside them. Soon there will not be enough space, cloth too thick, the colors mismatched, pinky fingers touching when one tries only to pull them away. No, they will no longer wish to make promises together. Such things are too binding, like black magic that blazes green.

"McKinnon," the boy named Remus muses, "aren't you one of those old Ravenclaw families?"

Remus has eyes deeper than the scars that mar his face, brown like the chocolate one chews after a dementor's long poise upon their heart, dragging cloak, and frozen soul. He is the calmness that draws upon lakes after a fierce storm, muddied waters that none can see to the bottom of, uneasy, and placid.

"Ravenclaw," another boy snickers, lowly, and into the palm of his hand, "buncha snoots if you ask me."

"Well nobody did, did they, Peter?" James says in the same way he does most things, as though it wouldn't matter if you disagreed with him but still with a searching blatancy that you should not, like when a lion bows its head to you, all corded muscle and hidden fangs. He lounges casually and tugs on a piece of Marlene's hair, fraying gold in his hands.

"No. Marlene digs okay," the final piece of James's trinity nods approvingly, all but holy. He is black velvet and a burning heart, silver eyes that slice. He feels like gravity, heavy, and cool, his dragon skin boots knocking toes with Marlene's dainty feet. She feels small, her whole body cracking upwards, they'll see this in her eyes last.

Sirius's own eyes are the color of a memory, like nostalgia, and a heavy heart. He and Marlene had met that summer when they seemed cold against the blue sky. He smelled of rotting flowers and dark wood polish, shaking his hair out, wild, and pulling at the buttons of his collar as though the very clothing were choking him, pinning down his spirit and restricting the silver mist of his life when all he has ever wanted to do is burn gold.

He had asked her who she was, but she did not answer him, had merely look at James like a question, her limbs folding to make the very mark of it. James had smiled, crooked, white, like a pearl between the purple stain of his tongue from Drooble's Best Blowing Gum. "You'll get along," he had said, "you'll have to. You're both my best mates."

She still hasn't decided if she believes him yet or not.

Later, Sirius smelled less of Pine Pixies' wood cleaner and more of broom polish, his collared robes stained green, spring grass and childhood play. He had said his mother would yell at him all night for those stains, but he didn't care. Marlene wondered if it'd be because the spring colored green didn't match that of a Slytherin's emerald blood. But James merely clapped the other boy on the shoulder, laughing, each of them coughing dust that caught like bullion in their lungs and the light of the falling sun. "Grown ups are always getting in the way," he said, pausing as though he were about to expel a great secret, the universe seeping from between his lips. Sirius and Marlene had leaned forwards, their chests forcing up through their throats, blooming. "They'll never understand," is all he had said, and they nodded their heads as though they could fathom any of it themselves.

Memories are useless things, they make liars of us, too easily lost, too easily changed. People were built to forget. "Anyways," Sirius says, drawing on the present, desperately chewing on the future as though he can consume it through his words and control it, a risky fate tugging upon untwined strings, "Anything is better than Slytherin."

Something lurched inside Marlene then, the start of a train, the way steel groans against steel, silver and heavy, and the opposite of gold. Silver, that must be the color of responsibility, and corrosion, the way our oxygen is masticated and drowned. The way our pores seep red and we gasp, a single forlorn inhalation that shatters the body and turns it away to dust, an outward exhibition of loss. Rust can be scrubbed off; hewing fingernails and aching joints, until the circulation of our blood betrays us, until the core of our insides turns brittle.

There is more than one way to fall apart.

Sometimes safety comes with violence, the destruction of your own soul. The way you dip your hands into your chest, fingernails scouring the bones of your ribs, you have felt for far too long what it is like to be trapped in a cage.

The way your heart feels pumping ceaselessly between the clutched fist of your palm. The way you shiver when a cool breeze runs through your insides. Since when have you been so passable, so trod-able? Since you began stepping upon yourself.

And they'll close their eyes upon the gore, upon the outstretch of your hand, upon the way a heart throbs between curled fingertips, upon the way it sounds the same splintered melody you used to cry each midnight when you believed yourself to be the only one awake. But you were not, and each of you was wrong.

And Marlene remembers words that sounded like darkness. The way she begged her father to purchase her wand a month early and fell asleep with it clutched to her chest. The way her mother whispers, sometimes too difficult to hear, like she has too much to hide and too much to reveal. That voice meant danger. That voice meant watch behind your back. And Marlene did, still is, with trembling fingers and a wand to sleep with in her night-robe's pocket.

She wonder's if she'll be able to fall asleep now without the sound of hushed conversation.

Scabs still itch upon the heart and her insides are so blue you'd think someone had slipped the sky in there, the way purple blossoms from bruises and blood and it looks like the universe fell apart within her walking corpse. But she still feels too small, too young to make fingers into fists.

But the first soldiers are always children and this is an old war. It happens the way gods are renamed, how they cease to dress them in jewels. Whose skin are they wearing now?

Poseidon resides in a lake of salt-water tears and lost dreams. Sometimes he catches pennies and listens to their wishes; sometimes he just lets them fall. There is nothing he can do for them now, not when the dream king is dead. He swallows the whispered words of school children and never dies, their wooden boats only yearly shadows. Sometimes their gasps sound of fear rather than awe, he swallows those too.

And this is all done in the shadow of castle that he may have once lived. He forgets, though. They say all gods do at some point.

Marlene listens to the universe at the back of one of these boats. Poseidon swallows her sighs. They have each learned how to survive, reflect, without stirring the surface; this is a proverb to them.

The damp wood falls away to the curve of her hands and her shape will be left there years later, water sloshing to touch the ghost of her fingertips. The boy next to her dips his hand into the great lake, obsidian ripples, the stars quivering at his glance. And he laughs and laughs and laughs but they do not. Not even as he picks them apart with his hands and scatters their water drop innards. They will dry out by morning with nothing left to remember.

The breath is sucked from the sky, a torrent in the lungs of children, past chapped lips and bite marks on gum. Everything is purple here, purple and gold. Like the threads on the seats of the Hogwarts express; they won't see those again until Christmas. And this? This they'll never see again.

"It makes it hard to see the moon." A person to complete their own quivering trinity speaks words of diffident resolution, the way you wake up in the morning without having dreamt. The thought that: this is all there is to be had.

"What?" the boy at the head of the boat turns to face her, a stalk to cling to the shore side and sink. He makes music as the wind passes through his bones, a shrill sound, like folded shoulders and a double dog dare.

The girl folds the air of the sky into her cheeks, rosy and distended. "The moon." And she has this quality as though she were the moon itself and the moon her, a quite radiance, and always with the thought of goodnight. Wolves howl for her, she is the very idea of homesickness, sickness without home.

"Waddya' mean?" The boy asks, his neck swiveling back and forth as though his bones have come undone, the wind had blown too hard; the instrument of his body has been mistreated. Reckless child, he is.

The other girl only shakes her head, dismissal: the way the boys waved goodbye to Marlene on the shore, the way James stood there until the night faded into him and each of them were gone to the other. She wishes she'd said goodbye too.

There is more than one way to be homesick.


End file.
